Hello and welcome again to Startups Weekly, a weekend e-newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and enterprise capital information. Before I bounce into right this moment’s subject, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote concerning the flurry of IPO filings. Before that, I famous the variations between elevating money from angels vs. conventional enterprise capitalists.
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What’s new
Venture capitalists search for corporations poised to disrupt markets untouched by revolutionary expertise. Believe it or not, a really small share of bijou purchasing is completed on-line, which suggests there’s an enormous alternative — for the best staff — to convey jewellery consumers and sellers to the 21st century.
Enter Pietra, a brand new startup that’s simply raised $four million in a spherical led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Andrew Chen (Substack & Hipcamp investor). Robert Downey Jr.’s VC fund Downey Ventures and Will Smith’s fund Dreamers Fund additionally participated, as did Hollywood supervisor Scooter Braun, Michael Ovitz and supermodel Joan Smalls.
I spoke to the founding staff, which incorporates Uber alum Ronak Trivedi and Ashley Bryan, who hails from vogue e-commerce website Moda Operandi. The pair convey a wholesome mixture of expertise and vogue experience to the combination. Trivedi tells TechCrunch he’s drawn on his Uber expertise to recruit engineers from high tech corporations and to advocate for quick development. Meanwhile, Bryan has leveraged her vogue trade connections to determine relationships with luxurious designers.
“Fashion is typically really under-resourced in terms of tech,” Bryan tells TechCrunch. “[The fashion industry] is great at the creativity part but it’s tough, especially with jewelry because you really have to put up a lot of capital.”
Pietra’s plan is to create a high-end market for shoppers to attach with jewellery designers. To do that, the staff has adopted the usual market method, taking a 30% market payment from sellers, in addition to a 7% payment from consumers commissioning jewellery on the platform.
“Whether you do custom jewelry or engagement jewelry or you do jewelry for celebrities like Drake, you can come on Pietra and connect with a global marketplace,” says Trivedi.
The jewellery market is predicted to be value greater than $250 billion by 2020, based on McKinsey analysis. And the place there’s a billion-dollar market, there are VCs.
“Even though gemstones and jewelry have been at the center of art, commerce, and culture since the dawn of human civilization — going from stone jewelry created 40,000 years ago in Africa to the trade routes between East and West to Fifth Avenue in New York to the Instagram feed on your phone — the technology for discovering, designing, and purchasing jewelry online hasn’t evolved much at all,” writes a16z’s Chen, who overlapped with Trivedi throughout his Uber tenure.
Pietra accomplished its official launch this week. It has 100 designers on the platform and counting, together with what the founders say is a prolonged waitlist.
In different information
This week I printed an extended characteristic on the state of seed investing within the Bay Area. The TL;DR? Mega-funds are more and more battling seed-stage traders for entry to the most well liked corporations. As a end result, seed traders are getting just a little extra inventive about how they supply offers. It’s a dog-eat-dog world on the market and everybody needs a stake in The Next Big Thing. Read the story right here.
Demo Day
Y Combinator graduated one other batch of 200 corporations this week. We have been there each days, taking notes on each firm. To make issues simple on you, I’ve put collectively the last word YC studying listing:
Here’s a have a look at a number of the profiles we’ve written on the S19 corporations:
Listen
We recorded two nice episodes of Equity, TechCrunch’s enterprise capital podcast, this week. The…
